[SEEK-Taxon] TCS & EML suggestions for improvement

[Matt Jones]

Nico,

I looked over your document, especially with regards to the EML changes. 
  Jessie asked me about this in a followup email.  In general, I think 
it would be an excellent idea to modify EML to make it compatible with 
the TCS as much as possible, and fix any underlying  problems in the EML 
represenation of taxonomic information.

There's really two places that taxonomic names would be found in EML. 
The first is in the taxonomic coverage subtree, the second is in the 
nonNumericDomain descriptions for defining coded values in data sets 
when those codes represent taxa.  Right now I think it is problematic 
that these two parts of EML aren't more closely linked, as it currently 
requires the taxon list to potentially be in two places to fully 
describe the data. So, I would like to fix that.

That said, we've struggled to get people to adopt EML and start 
providing metadata, and I know we will alienate some contributors if we 
make large and (seemingly) unnecessary changes. So, I'd like to minimize 
the impact of our revisions as much as possible, changing as few 
structures as possible.

As a minimum set of changes in taxonomic coverage, I think you want to 
get rid of the taxonomic tree and replace it with single entries.  That 
would probably be ok with me as long as the taxon can be at any rank.  I 
also think that adding a field for the TCS GUID, and possibly some other 
TCS fields would be fine.  I'll need to sit down and try to do a mapping 
between the fields that were in the TCS and those in the current EML. 
The current EMl structure is outlined graphically here:
http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/eml/eml-2.0.1/eml-coverage.png

I sort of got the impression from your email you might want more drastic 
changes, like putting TCS directly into EML.  That's a possibility, but 
a much harder sell to the community.  We should discuss these options 
sooner rather than later as I suspect a lot of metadata standards 
(including BDP) will be changing this year.  Its a good time for changes 
in the scheme of things.

Matt

franz at nceas.ucsb.edu wrote:
> Hi all:
> 
>    As a result of our meetings, the attached document summarizes a number of
> suggestions to improve the TCS and also EML. It is mostly intended for Bob and
> Jessie who will no doubt have further comments before any real changes are made.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Nico
> 
> Nico M. Franz, Ph.D.
> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
> MSB, Room # 3411, University of California
> Santa Barbara, CA  93106-6150
> 
> Phone: (805) 893-5934; Fax: (805) 893-8062; E-mail: franz at nceas.ucsb.edu
> Website: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~franz/ 
> 
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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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